


Buckaroo Banzai and the Solar Alliance

by Fabrisse



Category: Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension (1984)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 21:48:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fabrisse/pseuds/Fabrisse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The foundation of the solar alliance</p>
            </blockquote>





	Buckaroo Banzai and the Solar Alliance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [violeteyes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/violeteyes/gifts).



> Rawhide lived, and he tells the story.

It can be a little tough being on Team Banzai. Not everyone is as perfect as Perfect Tommy, and the boss, well, Buckaroo is a true polymath -- a first rate musician, a first rate medic, and a first rate physicist. So we get some pretty good adventures going -- adventures most people can’t begin to fathom.

Like, the time Buckaroo had us build a landing strip on some land he owned in the high Sierras. There wasn’t enough Promethium on earth to make the guides, it’s as unstable an isotope as you can find -- and only Promethium would be on the right frequency, or that’s what Buckaroo told me. Frequency for what wasn’t clear, so I called in Blue Blaze Irregulars from Cal Tech, MIT, and Virginia Tech (Georgia Tech was too busy partying) and the next thing I know, I’m in a two man ship called the Mule Team with Blue Blaze Irregular Caera Ngai mining enough Promethium and putting it into a stasis hold. I mean, yeah, Buckaroo’s Mom’s work on negative mass propulsion got us out of atmosphere -- and got me home in time to make the Hong Kong Cavaliers’ gig in Denver that night -- but it would have helped if Buckaroo could have let me know why we needed an unstable isotope with an X-ray type of beta decay -- y’know, just as a courtesy.

On the other hand, when the Moth people came from Chiron to discuss the first steps toward a solar system alliance, I was pretty proud of my handiwork. It was even more interesting to find out that they’d prevented the inhabitants of Rhea from taking out the Mule Team. Glad I didn’t linger, no matter how much Doctor Ngai liked looking at the stars.

Now the foundation of the Solar System League is still a top secret. It seems that the leaders of Earth were not the only ones watching our progress and how we handled the Lectroids of Planet 10. Titan, Encedalus, Mimas, Phoebe, Dion, and Rhea were all inhabited and observing our reaction. Of course, I’d been coordinating Buckaroo’s communications with Callisto and Ganymede for years, not that we told anyone other than the President and his Security Council about that.

However, I think this is the time to share what I know with all Blue Blaze Irregulars so that we can keep Earth safe, because, what this taught me, was that Buckaroo's words are right: "The universe is even bigger than everything."

***  
We had a gig in Kerala -- three surgeries in five days and a spot at the World Peace Festival and Concert down on the beach. Buckaroo Banzai and The Hong Kong Cavaliers were the Saturday night headliners, so the surgeries were scheduled around that and the rehearsals.

We arrived in the hovercraft two days early in order to acclimate. It also let Buckaroo, New Jersey, and I attend a yoga retreat at a nearby Ashram. Micro-neurosurgery requires an ability to bond with the patient and the tools, and while I’m on the invention, not the direct medical side, our meditation skills would be called upon intensively during the surgeries. New Jersey had a couple of odd experiences while in Hanuman asana, but neither Buckaroo nor I took them seriously. We should have.

Our first surgery was our earliest indication that things weren’t quite what they seemed. The teenaged girl, Anjani, did not have the expected tumor, rather Heschl’s gyrus was overly developed and she had irregular patterning in the Wernicke areas of the brain. When Buckaroo used one of his newly developed phased neural probes, she suddenly began speaking -- a not uncommon phenomenon with brain surgeries. What we hadn’t expected was New Jersey to begin answering her in the same language -- and the look on his face told us that he wasn’t in charge of what he was saying. Worst of all, no one else in the room recognized the language, and, among us, we spoke about twenty.

I recorded the incident and forwarded it all to Perfect Tommy on the hovercraft. He and Reno ran it through known language programs as well as coming up with some data analysis tools that no one but Team Banzai would even think to run. (Being around Buckaroo keeps a person thinking.)

Once the girl came out of the anesthetic, she was fine, speaking her own language and completely unable to communicate with New Jersey. Buckaroo asked some pointed questions of the doctors and then of her parents and finally, the patient herself.

She’d been having blackouts. I left New Jersey and Buckaroo reviewing the EEGs and CAT scans while I went back to the hovercraft to talk with the other Cavaliers. On my route, I passed the space for the music festival and checked out the people who were already waiting. Buckaroo’s security is part of all our job descriptions.

Some tourists were doing yoga, a few of the locals were either guiding them or showing them how it was done, when I noticed that two of the yoginis were in the full version Hanuman asana and I recognized what they were saying -- well, not recognized the words, but it sure sounded like the babble young Anjani was exchanging earlier with New Jersey. I pulled out my communicator and rustled up Reno. He got Pecos out to me with some recording equipment and Perfect Tommy came along to ask the perfect question, “What does a yoga stretch have to do with an unknown language?”

Buckaroo showed up and said, “Just because we can’t understand them, doesn’t mean they aren’t communicating.”

Pecos and I exchanged glances. Pecos said, “There’s a pattern, Boss, but it doesn’t conform to any language known to our team -- and that includes the Blue Blaze Irregulars. We already put out the call.”

Buckaroo nodded at this information and turned to me. “Do we have any of that Promethium left?”

“Sure, it’s in the hovercraft’s stasis hold. We moved out the steaks.”

“What’re you thinking, Buckaroo?” New Jersey asked.

“I’m thinking that Promethium can be viewed with a simple X-Ray if we can find a safe solution for ingestion.”

Pecos’ eyes lit up. “I get it. We can rig a portable X-Ray machine that can move around while people are in that monkey pose.”

New Jersey picked up the thought. “We might be able to tell more about how the hyper-development of the brain would allow the communication.”

“Rawhide,” I turned to the boss, and Buckaroo said, “I need you to figure out how to read the X-Ray results.”

“I’ll get with Tommy on that one. Are we going to rehearse tonight?”

Buckaroo thought about it for a moment. “We’ll use the same playlist as Denver and grab a half hour tomorrow. Right now, we need to get this problem solved. In the meantime, Reno, get in touch with the President, and have him call the Prime Minister of India to let her know what’s going on.”

We all nodded and split up to work on our own part of the problem.

***  
Perfect Tommy figured out how to get the Promethium safely into the blood stream in jig time, and Pecos and I puzzled out the best way to get the X-ray sets the boss would need. Reno kept working on the language with help from the Blue Blaze Irregulars; they were still having no luck.

Several yogis offered to be Buckaroo’s test subject, and we used all of them including setting up control groups of people who practiced yoga, but couldn’t do hanuman asana and people who didn’t know yoga from yogurt.

Pecos noticed that settling into the pose seemed to make the arms act like an antenna, tuning for clarity of signal. I jumped on that and used a couple of amps, an electrum harp string, and a crystal from Penny’s earrings to increase the sensitivity and range of our radio tuners.

As Pecos reset the X-ray for the fourth plate of the third person, I started to get something coming across that electrum wire. New Jersey looked at the plates as soon as they developed and said, “Buckaroo, check this out. They’re trying to communicate, but Broca’s area isn’t engaged.”

“The deuce you say.” Buckaroo looked at the squiggles I had as visual output from my improvised tuner and compared them across to the time stamps on the X-rays. “New Jersey, you and I will research how to prepare for this. Rawhide, you contact our Lectroid friends. They might be able to help you refine your tuner.”

“On it, boss,” I said.

I got John Emdall’s technical aide, John Cash on the horn. The Lectroids had noticed the frequency’s activity, but hadn’t realized it was an attempt to communicate. Two hours talking with John Cash, Pecos at my side, and we had a working frequency manipulator. We’d have to replace Reno’s soprano sax when we got back home.

By the time we were done, New Jersey was scrubbing up. Buckaroo had decided that he would be the one to make the first attempt at communicating with our unknown group.

John Cash stayed in communication with us, and I patched in the folks from Callisto and Chiron for good measure. Reno was talking with the President and the British and the Indian Prime Ministers. I think that moment was the beginning of the solar alliance, four different planets and three different countries watching Buckaroo try to communicate with another entity.

Perfect Tommy gave Buckaroo a rubdown so that he could hold the position as long as he needed to. Pecos sterilized the frequency manipulator, and I scrubbed up to run it while Buckaroo’s brain was open.

The time came and Buckaroo got himself into Hanuman asana. The anesthetic was administered along with the Promethium trace, and New Jersey nodded to me as he began the surgery.

It took a few attempts, but once that frequency manipulator started reading the beta decay, things began to look up. John Cash helped narrow the frequency from their orbiting ship, and suddenly the frequency manipulator began making sounds as Buckaroo’s lips moved. It was still in that rhythmic gibberish, but New Jersey, in one of his flashes of insight, found the right neurons to cross link in Buckaroo’s brain. Suddenly, the words came through loud and clear, or rather the numbers did. Perfect Tommy transcribed them. They came in blocks and, after the fifth set, they repeated.

New Jersey nodded to everyone and helped Buckaroo out of his pose in order to close his skull. We're just lucky that Buckaroo heals fast. We even made it to our concert that night.

Long story short, the numbers turned out to be coordinates for a meeting just outside our solar system. It was purely a fluke that humans were able to pick-up the invitation first, but once our contacts knew, they started looking for the phenomenon in their own people. It seems whoever was sending the invitation, had been doing it for years.

Of course there was an emergency meeting of the UN, but Buckaroo brought John Parker along to represent our extra-terrestrial interests and the first official meeting of the solar alliance took place on the far side of the moon about a month after that.

We’re still in the planning stages for our RSVP. But I just know that the Hong Kong Cavaliers are going to be at that shindig.


End file.
